Our stay in Hitchin was a short one, for my parents became “£10 poms” and sailed from Tilbury to Adelaide, Australia, on the SS Arcadia in 1955. My father had been appointed to teach at Norwood High School, and we lived at 14 Silver Street, Clearview. In the 1950s, Silver Street was a gravel road that washed away downhill every winter and was regraded every spring. Opposite our house was a small, neglected paddock, a patch of long, dry grass and the occasional snake. A recent look at Google Street View shows that Silver Street has gone up in the world, with most of the once-small wooden tin-roofed houses being replaced by much larger homes, though in 2013 No 14 was still fairly original. The paddock is now a cared-for green space with mature trees and benches; it even has a name - Southbury Crescent Preserve, which is rather posh considering its merely a square of vegetation that wasn’t there 50 years ago!.

Milk monitor

In five years I attended three schools - Gepps Cross, where I didn’t last long because getting there involved crossing the wide, hugely busy Main North Road, Northfield and finally Enfield Primary Schools. Walking to and from Enfield Primary School involved traversing what was then a patch of dust and small trees and which has become Folland Park Native Bushland Reserve. Now fenced, the reserve has seen a rapid expansion in numbers of native species (the latest report that I can find is from 1997). Once a month or so, my brother and I would have to run a gauntlet of boys throwing stones and fists, presumably because we had red hair. I was unmercifully bullied at school for the same reason, and perhaps because I was a swot who came top of the class and was appointed stationery monitor. I would sit in the school stationery cupboard, selling wooden rulers, erasers, pencils and notebooks to my fellow pupils…I still love the smell of new notebooks and pencils. I was also given the job of milk bottle monitor, a much less desirable role that entailed sitting in the hot bicycle shed amongst the stench of sour milk, ensuring that everyone put their empty bottles, foil tops and straws in separate receptacles. Other school memories include watching a solar eclipse from the school yard, reflected in car paintwork, the one-legged woodwork teacher, failing miserably to understand Australian Rules Football, the never-fulfilled desire to buy a meat pie and a cream bun from the pie shop next to the school, the school’s failed attempt to get us to join the girls in country dancing, and, as I left Enfield Primary for the last time, my fellow pupils waving a vague goodby as they concentrated on a spitting competition.

Adelaide museum

Every Saturday my father would take me into the city and leave me either In Adelaide Library or the South Australian Museum while he disappeared for a few hours (I never knew what he did). Left to my own devices, I would explore book shelves and museum galleries. Although I read many children’s books, I was also free to browse adult works. The museum was then a place of dark mahogany and glass cases, crowded with the artefacts of the country’s indigenous peoples, as well as their skeletal remains. Long before we began to become more culturally sensitive, I would gaze at rows of sun-browned skulls that had been trepanned in different ways. I think I remember an adjacent gory illustration of the process. Sadly, it is likely that, although they are no longer on display, many of those skulls may still be in cardboard boxes in the museum stores, awaiting repatriation. But, for a child, unaware of what they meant to their indigenous descendants, those skulls were awe-inspiring, and probably set me on the path to becoming an archaeologist.

A crystal radio

If my imagination and curiosity was encouraged by my hours spent in both library and museum, it was put into overdrive by the gift of a crystal radio. This simple device, which was indeed at first powered by fiddling with a crystal and “cat’s whisker”, but subsequently by a new-fangled transistor, and which didn’t require a battery, allowed me to listen to radio stations around the pacific. Using my bed springs as a very efficient aerial, I would lie in bed with the radio’s uncomfortable bakelite headphones pressed to my ears, listening to programmes that were probably much too adult for my 7 to 10 year old mind and which included dramas and news filled with descriptions of murders and other violence from US radio stations. I also remember a radio adaptation of Edward Lester Arnold’s 1890 novel Phra the Phoenician.

Other Australian memories: walking up the hill to the house in Clearview for the first time in the white heat of Adelaide summer; the chip pan catching fire and hearing the fire engine siren as it approached from the Min North Road (by the time it arrived the fire was out, but the chief didn’t mind because he got to drive past his own home in the next street); Adelaide Botanical Gardens, our oasis; getting sunburnt at Glenelg beach (and the Glenelg tram); trams in downtown Adelaide; the quiet, cool Friends Meeting House; driving into the hills in our old Morris Minor; sitting on our porch listen ing to a neighbour playing the accordion; the ice cream man selling his wares from the back of a Holden; the baker’s horse-drawn van; red-back spiders on the garden fence…

14 Silver Street

In the latter half of the 1950s my parents lived at 14 Silver Street, Clearview, Adelaide. It was an austerity bungalow, newly built, facing what we called “the paddock” at the front and with a large garden behind.

The view was certainly clear, but not especially scenic. In one direction, Port Adelaide on the horizon, with a wasteland in the middle distance. In another, the dust clouds stirred up by cattle in the Gepps Cross abattoir. In those days, (feral?) camels wandered the wasteland, and there was a steam locomotive graveyard. The wasteland still appears to be, well, a bit of a wasteland (rubbish dump etc) but there were no camels visible on Google Streetview. The abattoir seems to have gone, to be replaced by housing and shops…well, I wouldn’t live there. I have a vague memory of a migrant hostel somewhere near there though. Although our house was basic it was a vast improvement on a Nissen hut.

The paddock was then a rectangle of scrubby dry grass in the summer and mud in the winter, when the gravel of Silver Street would disappear downhill, to be pushed back uphill every spring by a grader. The street is now tarmac, and the paddock is Southbury Crescent Reserve, with trees and what looks like mown grass. Our house in 2013 was just about recognisable, but most of the neighbouring houses have been replaced by much larger properties.

When we first arrived we had an ice box rather than an electric refridgerator, replenishing it from the ice man, who had a large box in the back of his Holden. The bread man had a horse and cart. The cart was streamlined, and the horse never stopped, walking slowly along the streets while the bread man ran from customer to customer.

Guess the most exciting thing too happen at 14 Silver Street was my mother setting light to a tray full of chips. By the time the huge fire engine arrived the fire was mostly out (I remember the firemen hosing down the blackened tray in the middle of the front lawn.

Back again:

Whilst my father was happy in Australia, my mother desperately missed England. We red-haired, fair-skinned children were unsuited to the unforgiving sun. And so after five years or so we returned to the UK, this time on board the Sitmar Line Fairsea. My father had been appointed to a deputy headship at St John’s Secondary Modern School, Sittingbourne, and as soon as we arrived I took the eleven plus exam and was enrolled at Borden Grammar School in the same town.

Last updated 10th February 2022